Why Capitalism Must Always Fail Democracy

                The typical way of thinking about economic systems is that they exist within and along side political systems.  Thus, we think of our culture as being both capitalistic and democratic.  We think of capitalism, socialism, or communism as merely ways of distributing wealth, as a means to match production with distribution.  In a fundamental way, capitalism is more about what has to happen to the world and the people in it for it to become ‘wealth.’  The means of this transformation is shared by both socialism and communism, even if they represent different ways to distribute that wealth.  At its core, capitalism has to destroy what is appropriated in order to make it transactional and void of any value except a monetary value.  Because it operates this way, capitalism and democracy will always and inevitably be at odds. 

                In his book, In the World Interior of Capital, Peter Sloterdijk develops a critique of the evolution of capitalism grounded in maritime expansion.  In order for trade to move beyond the family and tradition bound systems before capitalism, the things that were to be traded had to be extricated from their specific context of existence.  Therefore, every place was just another place instead of someplace specific and sacred to the people living there.  Once that move is complete, Sloterdijk goes into great detail about the way Henry the Navigator destroyed the ‘cosmic’ dimension of reality with latitude and longitude, everything everywhere is open to exploitation.  As Sloterdijk tells it, those ancient mariners got on those leaky ships because they wanted to make money.  They made money by uprooting people and products from their place in a cosmos and reduced them to ‘things.’ 

                At first glance this might seem more than obvious, but we’ve lived in a world without a cosmos for so long that we only have vague remnants of what it means.  All of us ‘own’ things that have more than a mere monetary value.  Maybe it’s something that was given to you by a parent or a loved one.  The extra value comes from its specific context in your life, the way you find meaning in the world.  One of the most famous examples of capitalism destroying the cosmos is the letter from Chief Seattle telling the president that he couldn’t understand how the government could separate the land from the people, the animals, the air and water, and the spirits.  In his Essay on Human Understanding, Locke says that land belongs to people who work it and develop it, not to those who merely appreciate or revere it. The contrast is obvious.  Capitalism only responds its own monetary values; it has no capacity to do otherwise.

                Democracy is supposedly based on another set of values.  Democracy is supposed to express the will of a people, and that will may or may not coincide with the monetary value of capitalism.  We can see this in our current situation where the government makes budgets reflecting only the monetary value (and really the monetary values of a very few) of a ‘need’ over any other way of calculating value.  How else do we understand our current national health care debate.  We have essentially decided to kill people to save money, even though the people at risk are supposed to be represented in the decision.  When GM decided to continue to produce ignitions that were faulty, knowing they were putting people’s lives at risk, they did so by calculating the cost of the lawsuits against the cost of fixing the ignition.

                At some inevitable juncture, the values of capitalism and the values of democracy are going to be incompatible.  Occasionally the social wins, but usually only in the most dire emergencies or in war.  The rest of the time, we live in a capitalistic society with democratic style markers.  Real democracy is possible only with a different idea and calculation of wealth.  Environmentalism is only possible in another economic model.  The challenges we face in this moment of profound social and political danger are being fueled by capitalism.  If we want a democratic future, we have to rethink what it means to be human and be wealthy.  We currently are trapped in a system that is killing us and the planet.  It will not self -correct.  The technology we have only makes it move much faster.  Old Chief Seattle knew something we have forgotten, money can’t buy you a clear conscience or a glass of clean water.

The Day After Trump

                The conventional wisdom about life after Trump is that American Democracy will reassert itself and a new America will emerge to heal the damage his presidency has caused.  I think there is good reason to be skeptical of that narrative.  There is a long list of the institutions and expectations that Trump has battered into submission, but it is a mistake to see him as some isolated aberration in an otherwise healthy democracy.  Trump is proof that in the long running battle for the soul of American destiny, capitalism finally defeated democracy.  We no longer live in a democratic society; we live in a capitalist society.

                In spite of warnings from folks like Chomsky, most of us have comfortably accepted the fairy tale that democracy and capitalism were not only compatible, they were necessary prerequisites of each other.  We thought that the freedom of individual consumption was the same as liberty.  It is not.  If we had been growing in a democratic direction, so many of the people who are supposedly represented in this democracy would not be so poorly served by it.  Perhaps the crowning absurdity of the capitalist mind set subsuming a democratic mind set is the declaration that corporations are people.  We live in a political system dominated by money and the relentless redistribution of wealth to the very few.  The two are joined at the hip.  Trump and the GOP didn’t invent that dynamic, they merely stopped pretending that it wasn’t true.  In the process, they turned what had been a flawed but optimistic country into a fearful and pessimistic one.

                There was a brief period in the last century when capitalism and democracy seemed to be in synch with each other.  The labor movement and the social programs of the New Deal that lasted for seven decades bound the two together.  That was possible because capitalism used to require workers to make money, and as even Henry Ford knew, that meant that workers had to be paid and cared for.  The care never included everyone; there were plenty of folks left out.  The grand narrative, however, was one of equality and prosperity.  Since the 1970’s that narrative has held on the face of overwhelming evidence that more and more efficient production did not mean wider prosperity.  Since the 70’s, wealth has been concentrated in the hands of fewer and fewer people, gradually creating what we now call the ‘one percent.’  This shift created a crisis for democratic capitalism.  What happens when the workers no longer matter, and the interests of capital are contradictory to the interests of democracy?

                The answer is the last forty years of domestic policy that has gradually eroded the safety net of the New Deal and the War on Poverty.  It culminates in the obsessive hatred of the very rich for health care and economic equality.  The last GOP tax bill wasn’t about ‘taxes’ or how to more equitably fund the government, it was a bold- faced heist of cultural wealth by the wealthy and their crony legislators.  Capitalism no longer needs workers, and that is going to become cataclysmically true when the rapidly approaching merger of automation and AI becomes reality.  Capitalism used to be based on a manufacturing base that required workers.  Capitalism today is based on a workerless manufacturing and an even more workerless financial industry.  Robots and computers don’t need rights or benefits, at least not yet.

                The Democratic Party has no real answer for this.  They may try to put salve on your economic wounds instead of gleefully rubbing salt and rubbing alcohol on them, but they have no idea or plan for how to fix this.  They don’t even realize the problem.  A lot of people who voted for Trump feel the anxiety of these changes in their gut.  They were fools to put their faith in him, but they weren’t wrong to sense that, for them, the system is broken.  I hope the ‘blue wave’ of 2018 is real.  I hope that Trump is impeached, and that Republican are beaten to a bloody pulp.  But that won’t really change the dynamics of this clash between capitalism and democracy.  If we stay locked in the silos of identity politics and miss the common enemy we face, then the Democrats taking power will mean almost nothing.  If we don’t realize that the form of capitalism we live under is toxic to democracy, then the first day after Trump will just be another dreary day.

               

               

                

An Imagined Order

                Languaging, Maturana said, is a way of bringing a world into being that we share with others and not a way of describing the world as it already exists.  In his book, Sapiens, Harari calls these new creations “imagined orders.”  We find ourselves in one of those moments where the imagined order has broken down and a new one has not yet emerged to take its place.  Times like these are always fraught with anxiety and uncertainty.  We tend to think of the Renaissance as this glorious flowering of art and invention, but for the people who lived it, it was hell.  In the rear-view mirror, imagined orders look stable, even inevitable, but in the moment of their creation they seem anything but.

                We stand at moment of great wealth and power – the greatest the world has ever known.  Mad men and idiots have the power to destroy the planet.  Fossil fuel robber barons are threating our survival trying to extract the last drop of oil the way a junkie frantically craves the last drop of their fix.  The greatest power of the last century is caught in a Dadaist travesty of noise and decay.  But amidst the chaos and cacophony a new story is starting to take shape.  It is currently being told in small tribal pieces, but a quilt of meaning is starting to slowly take shape.  Its successful creation is anything but certain.  We may not make it.  Much is stacked against it.

                It will be a difficult story to tell.  It won’t have something like the Edict of Milan to mark a clear distinction between past and future.  It won’t be the product of elites leading the masses.  It likely won’t produce constitutions and legal codes.  It won’t revolve around a central power.  It won’t be run by men.  The languaging of this new order will be localized and fragile until it becomes as strong as the root system of the grasslands.  It is a story that embraces contradiction and paradox over certainty and uniformity.  It will not be written by AI bots.  If it is to be written at all, it has to allow new voices and new ways of being to gradually build the resilience and strength to be heard.

                Some are already calling it a failure.  They say we need truth and order, forgetting that the truth and order they refer to was written in the blood of those oppressed by the old order.  We will have to be tolerant.  We will have to learn how to be still.  We have to learn to respect chaos – the thing the Egyptians and Greeks feared the most.  We have to learn how to recognize when we are wrong, and we have to learn to recognize each other.  It will have to start small and stay flexible and contingent.  We can all play a part – we can all be a witness.

                I hear the imperfect cords of this new harmony in Black Lives Matter and in #MeToo.  They have in common the demand that the silenced be heard, that the invisible be seen.  They challenge the old order’s habit of assigning moral clarity to a privileged few.  They broaden the scope and add to the range of the narrative.  They are a long way from being perfect.  The key will be if all of these new singers can recognize the choir.  Their stories need each other.  Right now, that isn’t happening, and it would be foolish to expect it to so soon in the process.  There is a long way to go.

                Can we learn how to equal without being alike?  The language and concepts of the old order will not help.  If we don’t escape the language of the old order it will pull us back in to the same contradictions and limitations it took so long to finally see and resist.  Can we embrace both science and poetry as essential and not fall into the desert of another false Enlightenment?  We are, as Beckett once said, “between a death and a difficult birth.”  This is going to require another leap in consciousness that involves more than a priesthood or professorate.  In the process we may even rediscover and redefine what it means to be ‘human.’  Like anybody getting ready for a life-changing move, it’s time to sort through the attic and decide what to throw away.

                This is all going to seem very frustrating and illusory until it suddenly seems inevitable and natural – until we can’t remember ever not thinking this way.  I don’t expect to be there when that happens.  This is a long road.  But I can lend whatever energy I have left to telling and listening to the stories we have to tell, to put the children to sleep and keep watch in the night.